Heinz's Email Blog September 2004 Archive

Plasma monitors are an interesting technology with an interesting caveat. Because they use a noble gas like Xenon to emit light, plasma TVs start buzzing at higher altitudes as the ... Read More

Was it not Julius Caesar who famously proclaimed: "I came, I sew, and I will win?" I guess this must be correct for Caesar also wrote extensively about the clothing ... Read More

Yesterday, I was on a mission to fetch something for a friend. The weather was miserable, the circumstances dismal and the location new. First, I got off the underground one ... Read More

Some time ago, I read a good tip for searching and finding things on the internet. It's no use typing a question in a search engine's entry field. No web ... Read More

The universe is expanding in all directions indiscriminately. One consequence of this standard of cosmological theory today is that there is no one center of the universe. This is also ... Read More

There seem to be two trends with cheap dealer's brands. Either the resources are invested in the product itself, resulting in a solid quality cake, for example, in a dull ... Read More

It seems that almost half of the respondents to a survey done last year enjoyed better sleep when they shared their bed with a feline as opposed to a human ... Read More

If the swarm of your friends resembles Raymond Chen's visual history of spam, it's time to set up a mailing list in IncrediMail and start group mailing: Once you have a ... Read More

SpamAssassin, the spam hunter that can spot even infantfish, has received an update. Not only did the license change from the GPL or Perl's Artistic License to Apache's, SpamAssassin also ... Read More

I loved the moment Apple announced they had signed a number of major indie labels for the European iTunes Music Store. "Conveniently fast" and "securely private" often seem to have ... Read More

The best ways to indulge in autumn's splendor of anthocyanins and carotenoids is a hike, of course, or maybe a bike tour. But you can also get some of fall's ... Read More

Sharp's shiny new NP-20CX-S kitchen waste composter may break down organic disposables silently using "Composting Bio Mix", but can you throw your electronic spam in it and hope for a ... Read More

Do you remember ilunga? A bouma is not quite the same thing, but they still share more than just sounding nice: ilunga exemplifies the problem understanding words is, and bouma ... Read More

What the Buddha did not teach is a significant portion of his teachings. What Mac OS X Mail does not look for in filters by default is a significant portion ... Read More

One of the reasons why I like mornings so much is the golden hour with its warm light. When the sun only rises, the light reaching the eye had to ... Read More

I don't know why, but I don't seem to be able to get a feeling for the amount of uncooked spaghetti necessary to get just the right amount of spaghetti ... Read More

Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client that comes on big wings, now flies even higher. Before reaching 1.0 status, Thunderbird becomes an RSS reader, learns to use a single Inbox folder ... Read More

KMail, the email program that always brings up fond memories of glorious crashes, has been updated with the release of KDE 3.3. KMail 1.7 brings additions as nice as HTML ... Read More

Some of the most grandiose actions are those done and kept in secrecy. Like putting a New England Fall leave in a book from the library that you can be ... Read More

The new Citroën C3 1.4i 16V will have a smart Stop & Start system that automatically turns off the engine when it is not needed and wakes it up from ... Read More

The interesting Quagga breeding project aims to bring back an extinct subspecies of the plains zebra that once populated South Africa. Unlike the zebras in this IncrediMail letter, the amazing ... Read More

In 1912 (or 1914?), Eterna presented the first wrist watch with an alarm at the Swiss National Exhibition. Now, some 90 years later, KlipFolio watches Hotmail with an alarm — ... Read More

No two handwritings are the same, but still many have tried to fake testaments or signatures, and not always in vain, I guess. Now scientists of the Università degli Studi ... Read More

What happens in the brain after a hefty meal and just before (not) falling asleep has been puzzling me for some time now. But that's another story for another time. ... Read More

A film about a typical day and the typical music in the life of The Beatles -- their first, A Hard Day's Night -- was inspiration enough for the first ... Read More

The calla "lily" is not a lily at all, and what makes it look like a lily, the "flowers", are not really flowers. The calla belongs to the Araceae, comes ... Read More

Thinking too much is not good for you. An important step is to realize and accept just that. But don't think about it too much... Also, don't devote too much time ... Read More

Whether you want to boil an egg, iron a shirt, shop, be happy or find the perfect formula, somebody has boiled it down to a formula of what hopefully are ... Read More

If you like your monitor to have a white point of D50 and proper color balance, the handy WiziWYG is a tool to place in your Startup group. Even if ... Read More

It is common to look at a watch and not know what time it is, not before, not while regarding the hands with visible exertion, and not afterwards. At least ... Read More

Think twice before you tell somebody in Italy "You are nobody!" A judge may take this to mean that you literally deny the other person the status of an entity ... Read More

POPFile, the Olympic email classification tool, is updated and now (officially) not for POP accounts only any more. POPFile 0.22.0 brings NNTP and SMTP filtering, and the IMAP module is ... Read More

If a miracle is defined as an event with a one in a million chance of happening and there are about 1,000,000 events occurring to you in a month, does ... Read More

One of the first things I learned when I tried to pick up drawing was to look at and depict not things but shapes (mostly triangles). I found this to ... Read More

Your computer probably is a bit negligent about keeping your secrets online. Fortunately, there are free tools to find and remove spyware. If you want to get rid of a number ... Read More

There was a time when turning knobs ruled the world. But then other controls looked much cooler and we had to select basic functions using finger-twisting button combinations. Fortunately, knobs ... Read More

intraVnews, the Outlook add-on that may help you with but in no way is like a job interview, sees a nice round of updates. New in intraVnews 1.1 is support ... Read More

When a child smiles for the first time, the Chinese tradition says the father taught it. Of course, Confucianism with its emphasis on culture and learning liked the idea. If ... Read More

When our stone age-ancestors found birds to appreciate fermented fruit, they may have gotten the idea to what we know as wine. A more mundane transformation can take place inside ... Read More

People in Europe, where the flying diamonds from Bolivia were in high demand, long believed that hummingbirds had no legs and slept while flying. While this is not quite true, ... Read More

According to a team of researchers at Ohio State University, asymmetrical extremities (hands, feet or ears, for example) coincide with aggressive behavior. There were just 100 participants in the study, ... Read More

Jean Cocteau was elected to L'Académie française in 1955. The surrealistic anti-establishment writer joining a conservative group of language guardians, that did not lack a certain irony. But Cocteau replied ... Read More

You're on a game show and have to choose between three doors, only one of which guards the price. After you have made your choice, the host opens one of ... Read More

Letting go of my treasured LEGO bricks was surprisingly easy. I don't think I really noticed it. (And then there's always LEGO WorldBuilder.) So, letting go is not always a ... Read More

Canadian psychologists have found out, believe it or not, that people who do not suffer from depression are more satisfied than those who do. (To their credit, they also found ... Read More

Aliencamel, the anti-spam service that goes 40 km and more to keep your email junk mail free, now takes the next and then the next and then still the next ... Read More